Iris Malikhân is immediately two things. It is a leather bundle charred in the grate, so smoky and bitter it short circuits to the word ‘chemical’ in my mind. But equally, it is a thick iris-vanilla cream that fills the room with a haunting sweetness.
It took me ages to figure out that second is causally linked to the first. Unwrap the scorched, blackened skin of the leather bundle, blowing on your fingers for relief, and you reveal the slightly singed, chalky orris roots that lie within, the violence of the char the catalyst to releasing those cocoa-thickened vanilla spores.
For six months, I have struggled mightily with the burnt part of Iris Malikhân. I believed that it was just like any number of other sweetened iris-suede scents out there – Dior Homme Intense (Dior), Bois d’Iris (Van Cleef & Arpels), Vanille d’Iris (Ormonde Jayne) and so on – just not as good or at least more ‘on trend’ in its use of those intrusive liquid smoke aromachemicals that brands like Maison Martin Margiela, seem to be so fond of.
Funnily enough, it was all those upvotes on Fragrantica for Iris Malikhân smelling like Dior Homme Intense that made me revisit the perfume and try to reframe it for myself. Because that comparison definitely doesn’t tell the full story. I’ve smelled Dior Homme knockoffs before (like D600 by Carner Barcelona) and there is more artistry and kink in this one’s little finger than in all of those. The weird Pastis-like note of artemisia or mastic upfront makes this clear.
The moment I was able to mentally reclassify the harshness of the opening accord as part and parcel of a leather tanning process – which in and of itself involves chemicals – was when the clouds cleared and Iris Malikhân clicked for me. Whereas before I was gritting my teeth through one part to get to the other, I now experience the fragrance as a whole, where the tanning chemical front end is key to unlocking and releasing the full fatness of that licorice crème anglaise, infusing it with a hint of anise, bitter chocolate, and woodsmoke. If I squint, I just about get leather. Heck, I can sometimes make out the shape of the purported orris root. But like Dior Homme Intense, Iris Malikhân is so much more than a sum of its parts.
Source of sample: Provided free of charge by the brand for copywriting purposes.
Just when I thought roses had lost their capacity to surprise, along comes Rozu, which wraps a fresh, dewy rose in paper-thin layers of pink pepper, shiso leaf, and aromatic grasses that crackle with intent. Surprisingly, it is not the spice or the aromatics that shine through the hardest. For me, it is the evocative aroma of freshly-turned soil that makes Rozu special. Moist, sharp, alive – this is the healthful, plush air inside a Japanese onsen. There is also even a tenuous link to mitti, an attar that captures the aroma of the first rains of the season hitting the red earth of Mother India.
In line with other Aesop fragrances, Rozu smells uncluttered. Simplicity is not shorthand for laziness, though. On the face of it, you might write Rozu off as a rose perched between herb and wood, a dash of pink pepper providing an electrical spark to keep it moving. But pay attention and you’ll start to wonder why you never noticed until now how minty shiso leaf can smell warm or how spices can smell cold or how a rose can smell indistinguishable from clay.
There is grace (and design) in the way your impressions are prompted to shift from roses to earth to spice to wood and back again. Yet, it is all as effortless as if Rozu had leapt fully formed from a Japanese forest floor rather than from a perfumer’s organ.
Hours in and you start paying for its supreme naturalness. One by one, the sharper, zestier notes fall back and even that dewiest of roses starts to feel a little faded around the edges. Every time I wear Rozu, I have to remind myself to stay still and let it roll over me like a fog. Otherwise, it is easy to miss parts of its conversation.
For example, on my third test, I noticed that Rozu has a deeply fragrant, almost ‘dry-roasted’ drydown that, while subtle, provides the wearer with the sense of a party meandering pleasantly to a close instead of the abrupt full stop common to most ‘natural’ (or natural-styled) fragrances. Whether this is due to a particular resin or wood is besides the point. If you’re still paying attention at this stage, the only solid thing you grasp is a feeling of warmth.
My God, but it’s good.
Source of sample: I have sampled Rozu several times in a department store. Unfortunately for me, Aesop seems to apply production pricing to its catalogue of scents, so while other Aesop fragrances cost as little as €100 per 50ml bottle, Rozu is priced in the €150 range (implying that the essential oils required to make it are particularly expensive). One day, probably when the Aesop shop girls start to object more vociferously to my soaking myself in 20mls in it at a time, or when my Catholic shame gets the better of me – whichever comes first – I might be persuaded to bring it home with me.
Always brave, I think, for a perfumer to set their cap at making a chypre in this day and age. Most falter not because they can’t find an oakmoss replacement or the low-atranol stuff, but because they are so focused on getting the moss element right that they miss the whole point of a chypre in the first place, which is that abstract, kaleidoscopic richness, that sweet-and-sour balance that makes your mouth both salivate and shrivel up a bit. Good chypres feel murky and on the knife edge of bitter to me – a mysterious conflagration of forest floor and a miso-based tare that took hours to make.
Chypre Sultan feels like a real chypre because it treats the chypric model (bergamot, moss, labdanum) more as a suggestion than a straitjacket. Bergamot? Forget bergamot, too stuffy, let’s put yuzu in instead. Labdanum? Booooring. Tends to take over. Put in the quietest of sandalwood instead, creamy and substantial enough to anchor the scent.
In playing fast and loose with the rules, Chypre Sultan successfully captures the mysterious umami character of chypre that eludes the grasp of others. The opening is winey and dark, a dense carpet of forest floor notes – minty wet moss, woods, artemisia, hay, sage, perhaps even a touch of rubbery myrrh – which give it a distinctly medicinal tinge, similar to Tiger Balm. It wears like the deepest green velvet this side of Scarlet O’ Hara’s curtain dress.
Naturally, being an Ensar Oud creation, Chypre Sultan is kitted out with the most exquisite medley of natural oud, castoreum, and musks, which weighs down the flightier herbal and citrus notes, and creates the ‘pea souper’ murkiness so essential to a chypre’s character. It is so thick that I can almost taste it at the back of my mouth.
The castoreum alone is extraordinary – leathery, almost burnt in its dryness, and in conjunction with the minty-vegetal tones of the (genuine) oakmoss, distinctly savory in tone. The musk element is not animalic or heavy-smelling in and of itself. In fact, it seems to be there only to give the castoreum and oakmoss this buffed-out, diffused ‘glow’ effect. Imagine burying your nose in a man’s leather jacket and then walking around in a ‘head space’ cloud of those same molecules all day long. This feels like that.
Surprisingly for such a dense, winey stew, I can clearly smell the jonquil. Jonquil is a type of daffodil (narcissus) that smells like hay but also quite like jasmine under some conditions. At some point, the sweet, sunny wafts of hay and jasmine begin to shake loose of the darker backdrop, and the effect is like a sudden shaft of sunlight piercing the gloom of a medieval forest.
Bear in mind that this floral effect is really subtle. There is, however, a moment when the savory (almost celery-like) oakmoss meets the jonquil, and I think of Vol de Nuit. It is a similarly ‘long simmered greens’ train of thought that connects the two. But of course Chypre Sultan is an indie-artisanal perfume, while Vol de Nuit is a perfume made in the grand manner of French classical perfumery, so both the finish and the intent are very different. Chypre Sultan is, naturally, far richer, more pungent, and rougher around the edges than Vol de Nuit.
But there is a distant link, nonetheless, and you might be the type of person who prefers the raw authenticity of the natural ouds, musks, or oakmoss that an artisan outfit can offer. Chypre Sultan is Vol de Nuit if she got up from her table at Le Cinq, delicately wiped her lips on the Irish linen napkin, and disappeared off into Fontainebleau forest to roll around in the muck and the hummus and the animal carcasses, only to emerge naked ten hours later with nothing more than a smirk and eyeliner smudged all over her chin.
There is only one slightly difficult moment for me, and that is when all the minty herbs and hay-like florals fade out, leaving only the surround system of the castoreum, musk, and oud to play out their slightly gloomy brown tune. Without the distraction of the fresher notes, the oniony-sweat nuances of oakmoss, complete with that slight over-stewed celery tea note, start to wear on me a little. However, the rich, rubbery castoreum, musk, and oud step in to smooth this over and it steadies itself, finishing out the day (and this is a serious all-day kind of thing) in a softly murky, leathery-foresty haze that hovers rather than ‘sits’ on your skin.
I am hard-pressed to say what Chypre Sultan might be compared to, because a perfume by an oud artisan like Ensar Oud is always going to be on a different level of pungency and purity to a commercial perfume. So, allowing for the sheer ‘apples and oranges’-ness of the comparison, I suppose that Chypre Sultan reminds me a little of Diaghilev (Roja Dove) in terms of the bitter, foresty greenness and masculine-leaning character. However, Diaghilev has a stouter floral core and, being a commercially-produced rather than artisanal perfume, lacks the leathery castoreum-musk depth of Chypre Sultan.
Chypre Palatin (Parfums MDCI) is also a fair comparison, but is much sweater and creamier, its florals appearing almost powdery in comparison (Chypre Sultan is a powder-free zone). The Vol de Nuit linkage is but a fleeting impression and probably a figment of my overactive imagination; Dryad (Papillon) is another possibility because of its costus note.
But in fairness, Chypre Sultan is far less classical in structure than these two fragrances, and in its ‘brewed up in a wild jungle’ intensity, comes closer to the tannic, crunchy-organic Peruvian Amazon experience that is Carta Moena 12|69. In terms of murkiness, complexity, and that ‘Chinese meal’ completeness you get with a good chypre, it drifts along the same orbit of Kintsugi (Masque Milano) without smelling like it at all. Either way, Chypre Sultan is very much its own thing, and that thing happens to be a force of nature chypre.
Source of Sample: Ensar Oud very kindly sent me a sample free of charge for review purposes (I paid a small customs fee). I freely acknowledge that I am in a privileged position, as a fragrance writer, to receive free samples of the most expensive or rarest fragrances in the world. The hope is that I perform some sort of service for the reader by reviewing them.
Oh, opoponax, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. First, there’s the fact that, in its upper register at least, this is a resin that doesn’t know that it’s a resin at all. In fact, it wants to be a spice or a herb, but can’t decide which, which is why the first flash of opoponax lurches wildly between the metallic, sweaty sting of clove and the aromatic camphor of bay leaf. It’s like listening to a teenager’s voice breaking.
Then, there’s the ambery resinousness in its lower registers that smells like a rich toffee but also quite a bit like Disaronno, which gives it a boozy almond butter tonality that cracks the safe open a little to reveal how the drydowns of No. 5 (Chanel) and Shalimar (Guerlain) are actually constructed. There is even a hint of Johnson and Johnson’s Baby Powder or Baby Oil that lingers towards the very end. Now when people talk about wet wipes or nappies when it comes to either the Chanel or the Guerlain, I have an idea where that association is coming from. New level unlocked.
Lastly, the fact that the transition between the astringent spicy-herbal topnotes and the almond taffy basenotes is awkward as hell, which makes things interesting. Sometimes, this clash of cymbals produces an old fashioned bay rhum effect that makes me think of amber mixed up with Old Spice or Brut. There is a lingering soapiness in among all that almond butter richness that calls to mind shaving foam. Personally, I love this confusing mash up of balsamic sweetness and rinsing herbal sourness. You get the gold honey of a resin and the aromatic rigor of a barbershop fougère. What’s not to like?
I bought Empire des Indes (Oriza L. Legrand) blind because I’d heard that it was an opoponax perfume. I heard right. At first spray, I thought that perhaps I’d screwed myself because, you know, opoponax will opoponax, and is there really any point to owning something that repeats on you like a burp across your collection if you already own Imperial Opoponax (Les Nereides), Ligea la Sirena (Carthusia), and the Big Daddy of them all, Eau Lente (Diptyque)? Not to mention Jicky (Guerlain) and Bengale Rouge (Papillon Perfumery), no slouches in the opoponax department themselves.
But not to worry, because Empire des Indes, though it certainly possesses a strong opoponax character, has been dressed quite differently to these perfumes, and therefore occupies a different slot on my collection. The sweaty metal of opoponax’s clove topnotes are softened by a dusty cinnamon Nag Champa accord, which has the effect of puffing the perfume up and out into a sweet, ambered dust cloud that shifts softly around you as you move. It is something you can cuddle into. By comparison, Ligea la Sirena is more citrusy-hot with lemons, sour tea, and carnation, a jagged knife perfect for cutting through the heat, while Imperial Opoponax is shaving foam central before hitting its toffee stride much later on.
Empire des Indes probably comes closest in orbit to Bengale Rouge due to the shared emphasis on that spicy cinnamon and a rich ambery-balsamic tonality. They are both, it must be said, perfectly slottable into that one slot you likely have reserved for spicy ‘orientals’ whose primary function is to warm your bones (and emit a golden, balsamic sillage) when the weather is cold. But in terms of weight and ‘thicc-ness’, there is no competition – Bengale Rouge is a Two-Ton Tessie, its generous pours of honey and tonka bean keeping the resin in place like a weighted blanket. Empire des Indes is far lighter and more diaphanous, similar to the weight of something like Fêtes Persanes (MDCI Parfums), Black Cashmere (Donna Karan), or Theorema (Fendi).
But, of course, opoponax is not the only show in town (if it were, I’d recommend just going out and buying some opoponax). There are some really nice, interesting things happening in Empire des Indes that make this so much more. For one, ginger adds a savory, mealy texture to the cinnamony topnotes, creating a briefly musky, almost urinous twang that some will invariably interpret as Musc Ravageur-lite (ginger does something similar in Shams Oud by Memo). Sandalwood adds a gently peanutty milkiness that fades too quickly for my liking.
Once the spicy-herbal flash flare of the opoponax dies back a little, the scent breathes and stretches its limbs into that golden, toffee-ed resinousness (splashed here and there by Old Spice) that one expects from opoponax in general. But where Empire des Indes innovates is in its earthy shading of this ambery accord with the cocoa-ish dust of patchouli and what smells to me like the curried maple leaf richness of immortelle. (Neither of those notes are listed). These accents, coupled with the dusty nag champa, give the perfume a witchy, leaf-blown tenor that feels like something out of the Solstice Scents catalogue (Foxcroft, Inquisitor, or Manor Fire, for example, some of which feature a similarly indie ‘burning autumn leaves’ accord). Not headshop territory, exactly, but heading in that direction.
Or would had Empire des Indes lasted any longer than it does. The trajectory from top to bottom is regrettably short. At least those last tendrils of dusty nag champa seem to be standing in for what otherwise might be a white musk or something abrasive, like Iso E Super, i.e., it carries the perfume across the last mile without compromising any of its delicacy. Still, this is not a terribly rich or deep perfume. It floats in wisps and tendrils and drafts. Indeed, you might say that the only downside to Empire des Indes is its softness. But you know what? Like Fêtes Persanes, that is possibly what I like the most about it.
Source of sample: Sample? Baby, when it comes to opoponax, I buy the whole bottle. Sometimes even blind. I purchased my bottle directly from Oriza L. Legrand.
It’s been a while since I last wrote about Abdullah’s work at Mellifluence, which was about his amazing Tsuga Musk mukhallat featured in my Basenotes article, ‘The Murky Matter of Musk‘ (1 September, 2017). Four years might have passed since then, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been dipping into Mellifluence’s wares in the meantime. Last summer, I placed an order with Mellifluence for some raw materials and mukhallats, and Abdullah generously included some samples of stuff he also wanted me to smell. I’m getting to them only now, which unfortunately means that some of the scents I talk about are now unavailable.
Because here’s the thing you need to know about Mellifluence before you invest – Abdullah works in small batches, using naturals he has sourced elsewhere, and when that material runs out, so too does the mukhallat featuring it. That means you need to work fast, with a speedy turnaround time from sample to full bottle (well, tola) purchase if you’re going to snap up the thing you love. The house style is light, clean, and delicate, which is no mean feat considering the ofttimes heaviness of some of the naturals involved. In general, Abdullah excels at work involving rose, green herbaceous notes like lavender, tuberose (which he is able to render quite masculine), oud, and vetiver.
To the best of my knowledge, Abdullah works only with naturals, because of certain sensitivities he experiences when dealing with synthetics. But worry not, while the all-natural focus does give his work a certain ‘crunchy granola’, aromatherapy-adjacent flavor, I haven’t personally experienced any of the muddiness you sometimes get with all-natural perfumery. The flip side of all this lightness and clarity is, however, a certain lack of projection and longevity. But people seeking out the authenticity of raw materials above all else are already mostly prepared for this trade-off.
The other things to be aware of are that these are mukhallats, not attars, though people (and brands who make them) tend to use the word ‘attar’ to describe any perfume in oil. Strictly speaking, however, though mukhallats and attars are both oil-based (i.e., they do not contain alcohol), attars are defined by their manner of production, which is the distillation of raw materials into sandalwood oil in the traditional ‘dheg and bhapka’ method (named for the copper piping and leather receptacle involved in the method) used in Kannuaj, India. A mukhallat, on the other hand, is the term used to describe a mix (mukhallat is simply Arabic for ‘blend’ or ‘mix’) of any already distilled essences, absolutes, attars, ruhs, and oud oil (and sometimes even synthetics, increasingly so in modern times) with a carrier oil, which used to be sandalwood oil but for reasons of both cost and availability these days is more likely to be something like moringa, jojoba, or even good old vegetable oil. For those of you who don’t care about the pedantry of this, your main takeaway should be that these are oils, and often highly concentrated ones, and therefore need to be dabbed onto the skin (or beard, if you have one) in judicious amounts. A dab will do ya.
Hellicum
Hellicum’s opening is both medicinal and animalic – fresh lavender and sage dipped in something lasciviously scalpy, like costus. There is also a brief flash of something sweet, like vanilla or honey, but this is gone almost immediately. Oud emerges from a mist of sinus-clearing eucalyptus or mint, and it is almost outrageous to me that a wood oil so deeply thick, so animalic, can be stretched out and massaged into something so airy. Flanked by those soft, camphoraceous herbs and pinned in place by a waxy amber accord that smells like a minty version of a Werther’s Original, the oud reads more as a light, clean leather than the stable filth that we are sometimes asked to grit our teeth through in the name of oud.
And this is precisely the kind of sleight of hand that Abdullah of Mellifluence excels in. Heavy, animalic substances tweaked until they are transformed into something clean, and delicate, qualities more suited, perhaps, for the soothing of frayed nerves than for the purposes of seduction or for projecting an image of yourself onto the world.
It is not a slight to suggest, by the way, that Hellicum, like many Mellifluence mukhallats, is more Rescue Remedy than perfume. Sometimes, that’s what life calls for. I rarely wear fragrance during the day, choosing instead to aromatherapize myself off the stress ledge by rubbing a Mellifluence mukhallat or one of his naturals onto a knuckle, or massaging some of my Francesca Bianchi Under My Skin body oil into the ends of my hair. These quiet, subtle whiffs of aroma as I type, gesticulate, or turn my head are what propel me through my workday, a friendly hand at the small of my back. Hellicum is really good at this. I especially love the hidden thicket of patchouli tucked into the tail of the scent, there to please anyone who’s been paying attention.
Spirit of Narda II
Part of the risk of falling in love with any Mellifluence mukhallat is returning to the brand’s Etsy page and realizing that it no longer exists. I hope that Abdullah finds some way to bring this back, though, because to my nose, it is one of the best things he has ever made. It reminds me of a long lost love of mine, which is the sadly discontinued Bohèmians en Voyage (Alkemia), which had a similar pastoral quality to it, like a stroll along countryside lanes, past fields of wheat and sunny hedgerows full of wild barley and small wildflowers.
The ‘Nard’ in the title refers to spikenard, or jatamansi, an intensely aromatic herb native to India not a million miles away from lavender in overall scent profile, but featuring a uniquely fatty, animalic undertone, like beef tallow or the yellow subcutaneous fat under the skin of an organically reared piece of mutton. In Spirit of Nard II, the herbaceous aspects of the spikenard are sharp and spiky, like a thistle, but there is also a milky element to the it that’s relaxing to the point of inducing sleepiness. This is bracketed by medicinal woods – an antiseptic sort of oud material, no doubt – and a soft, vegetal muskiness.
Spirit of Narda II feels complex and multi-layered, a haze wherein herbaceous, woody, milky, floral, and musky molecules advance and recede in such a crazy loop that you are never sure what it is all supposed to be, category-wise. Each time I wear it, I’m stumped. Is it an oud masquerading as a Spanish leather? A herb that’s secretly a sheep? A plant revealed by those meddling kids to be a medicine? No idea. But two things it is not are (a) available to buy, and (b) aromatherapy rather than a fully-realized perfume.
Miel Pour Femme (Almond)
This is an odd one. Not honey at all, but rather, a pale wodge of barely set beeswax poured into a polished oak mold and wrapped up in rustling layers of that edible paper they roll candy cigarettes or torrone in. It smells varnishy, waxy, and ever so slightly stale, like printer paper or Holy Communion wafers left open in a wooden chest. I suppose all this is also very much almond – not the syrupy cyanide (benzaldehyde) tones of most almond accords, but the grassy tannins of raw almond that you get in fragrances such as L’Amandière (Heeley). The overall effect has been achieved with a combination of benzoin (for that communion wafer aspect) and beeswax (for that waxy white honey aspect). The scent thickens up, over time, into a blanched, stodgy sweetness that is never as animalic or as thick as real honey, but still quite a distance away from the beeswax-paper-almond of the first half. Miel pour Femme (Almond) is fine, if a little odd. It just doesn’t set my world on fire quite as effectively as Spirit of Narda II.
Source of sample: I purchased 3mls of Miel Pour Femme (Almond) from the Mellifluence Etsy page, and 0.2ml samples of Hellicum and Spirit of Narda II were included as a gift with purchase.
What is myrrh? Myrrhis a gum produced by the Commiphorah myrrha species of tree native to the Arabian Peninsula and North-East Africa. Deriving from the Arabic word مر (mur), meaning ‘bitter’, myrrh oil is used all over Arabia, China, and India as a traditional medicine.
Oil versus resin: Myrrh oil is quite different from myrrh resin. Myrrh oil can be bitter, rubbery-smelling, and often quite saline (mushroomy). The resin smells earthier, slightly sweet, with musty undertones – when lit, it smells quite smoky (well, duh).
What does myrrh smell like? While frankincense is a soaring series of sunny, high-pitched notes like lime peel or crushed pine needles, myrrh is dark, fungal, and gloomy, reminding one of the dark shadows behind massive stone pillars in a cathedral, signed pine, tar, anise, licorice, and the scent of freshly-sliced ceps. It can be soapy, fatty, or rooty. In perfumery, myrrh lends a subtle, earthy tone pitched halfway between soil and stone. It has a sepulchral quality, leading some to categorize it as Gothic or moldy.
Some facets of myrrh are intensely bitter, while some smell like sweet licorice, anise, or rubber. Often the resin smells latex-y and saline (in cookery terms, if frankincense is a citrus fruit, myrrh is volcanic salt).
Personally, I often perceive myrrh as smelling ‘hollow’, as if there were a tear in the fabric of the fragrance where the aroma is supposed to be (a sort of negative space). Myrrh has a deeply atmospheric smell, redolent of the air inside centuries-old European cathedrals.
Below
are some examples of myrrh-based fragrances, or fragrances where myrrh plays an
unexpected or pivotal role, even if unlisted.
Oriental
Velours (Les Indémodables) – Fog
Machine Myrrh
This is
a magisterial – and wholly original – take on myrrh. I find something new to
marvel at every time I wear it. Fresh spearmint, spruce, rosemary, and fennel pollen
crushed hard between my fingers, releasing a bitter, foresty odor into the
chill night air, where it meets the equally bitter, foresty myrrh in its
natural habitat, oozing from a hundred different cracks in a tree stem. But not
the twisted, sun-battered husks of Commiphorah myrrha tree native to the
Arabian Peninsula and North-Eastern Africa – imagine instead a Northern pine or
spruce standing tall in a Scandinavian forest, weeping big fat sticky tears of
myrrh, which magically disintegrate into a million powdery spores once they leave
the tree.
The texture of the scent is important to note. Though both fir balsam and myrrh are sticky, dense, resinous materials that are about as easy to manipulate as a tin of molasses, here they seem to cancel each other out and disperse through the air in a sheen of glittering, super-fine mica. The effect is of myrrh and mint plunged into a dust cloud of ‘matte’ peppery notes that smell half like the business end of a just-lit firework and half like the sharp, grey chemical fog emitted by an over-enthusiastic fog machine (think Baptême du Feu by Serge Lutens, the recent Crimson Rocks by Amouage, or Fleurs et Flammes by Antonio Alessandria for similar ‘fog machine’ or gunpowder effect).
The more I wear this, the more I think that the damp, mealy bog land vetiver used here plays the largest role in achieving this textural effect. Gunpowder, fireworks, sulfur – whatever it is, it makes the scent feel exciting and taut. The vetiver acts as a gray-green, washed out, faded piece of velvet tamping everything down, giving the scent a mellow, low-key grassiness that is nonetheless devoid of sunniness or light.
There is something so simultaneously cleansing and plush about this scent that it feels like being wrapped in ermine while breathing in the air of a snowy forest. I’d like to say that the experience feels wholly natural, but of course, it does not. Aside from the ‘fog machine’ or gunpowder effect, there is a tiny hint of that metallic aftershave undertone that anything pine or spruce-like brings to the party.
Happily, though I first perceived this first as a spoiling dose of Iso E Super, I have found that if I re-frame this note for myself as more of a hangover of pine than a deliberate application of some burnt-smelling wood aromachemical, then I can live with it. (I am good at talking myself through the rough spots in a scent that I really love).
Interestingly, the clash of vanilla against this aromatic set of notes, plus that gray-green nutmeal vetiver, creates a brief whoosh of something that feels as powdered and plush as a tin of cocoa powder blown out into hot glass. The ‘velour’ part of Oriental Velours is accurate even if the ‘oriental’ is not – this is old velvet and ancient wooden furniture collapsing with time into dust spores that carry the breath of the forest with them. Licorice, mint, grass, and root buried under acres of quiet, black dust.
Myrrhiad
(Huitième Art) – Myrrh for Myrrh Pussies
A single
nugget of myrrh mercy-drowned in a pudding bowl of waxen vanilla, with a sweet
amber accord thickening it up like arrowroot. Myrrh will out, of course, and in
Myrrhiad, it comes through as the soft, sappy licorice accent running along the
back of the scent like rubber tracking. Think
the chewy licorice vines you get in the pick n’ mix at the cinema that are more
texture than flavor, rather than the oily, resinous, or mushroomy twang you
have in real myrrh. This is essentially myrrh for myrrh pussies, which might be
an accurate way of describing me. Balmy, vanillic – Bvlgari Black-lite. Love it.
Baume
du Doge (Eau d’Italie)– Myrrh
Agrodolce
Like its brothers, Bois d’Ombre for the same brand, and Dzongkha for L’Artisan Parfumeur, Baume du Doges (Eau d’Italie) is emblematic of a period in Bertrand Duchaufour’s career when he seemed deeply interested in excavating the vegetal, vinegary side of resins for brilliant effect in incense compositions stuffed with dried fruit, smoky grasses and roots, and odd accents like whiskey or wet newspapers. The effect is that of sourness balanced by sugar and a hit of smoke – a sort of myrrh agrodolce.
True to
form, the opening of Baume du Doge emits a sharp vetiver and cedarwood frequency
that smells like the burn in your throat of a particularly smoky Laphroaig.
This spicy burn is simultaneously calmed by a balmy orange milk accord and revived
with a clove note that splits the difference between a licked spoon and a
virulently camphoraceous mint. This creates a wonderful vanilla-orange-peel-incense
accord that smells like Christmas morning. The vanilla is restrained; just a smear
of something friendly to take the sting out of the astringent myrrh.
Because this is essentially a myrrh perfume. With its gloomy demeanor, myrrh is the sulky emo teen of the resin family, but here, a smile has been pasted on its face by way of a bright, boozy sparkle that feels like the crunch of cassonade on a crème brulée. The brown-gold depth this creates is not a million miles away from the deep dried fruit, vodka and whiskey notes in Ambre Russe (Parfums d’Empire), minus the black tea and leather notes that take that great perfume in another direction entirely. Still, I think it’s remarkable that both Baume du Doge and Ambre Russe manage to smell quietly but resolutely masculine, despite the presence of sugary, ‘edible’ notes.
The
richness of the resin against the vegetal tartness of the vetiver and cedarwood
smells absolutely right, as if the basic bones of this successful marriage
already existed in the air, waiting for a perfumer with vision to come along
and bring it all together. Unfortunately, Baume du Doge runs out of steam
quickly, getting quite threadbare in the drydown, so those looking for that
brilliant, rich orange peel incense and milk accord to be sustained throughout
may be disappointed.
Myrrh
Casati (Mona di Orio) – Flat-Coke Myrrh
Myrrh Casati is something of a head-scratcher. The first Mona di Orio fragrance to be composed by someone other than Mona herself, following her tragic death in 2011, it is rendered in a style that seems to deliberately side-step any of Mona di Orio hallmarks. It lacks the almost overbearingly rich, dirty woodiness of Vanille and Oud, the dry-ice almond musks from Ambre and Musc, and the harsh animalism of Nuit Noire and Cuir. Without these little olfactory clues that tucked so deftly into the sleeves of her work, I am lost. Myrrh Casati could be the work of anyone.
If her other perfumes are rich tapestries, then Myrrh Casati is a silk gauze. It is beautiful but simple to the point of being spare. The opening is particularly striking. A dark, dry spice note fuses with a warm, cinnamon-tinted Siam benzoin and sharp black pepper to form the exciting specter of tarry Coca-Cola. There is also an arresting black rubber tint to proceedings, prompted by saffron or the myrrh itself (which can sometimes smell like rubber or latex). But this opening salvo of richness or darkness quickly attenuates. Within minutes, all that remains on the skin is a vague glaze of something spicy and something minty-licoricey, loosely held together by the benzoin.
Eau
d’Iparie (L’Occitane) – Mossy
Myrrh
Apart from a honeyed, fruity (almost berried) topnote not present in the original, the reissue of Eau d’Iparie remains mostly the same as before – a very natural-smelling, balsamic myrrh fragrance that sets the myrrh in an outdoors context rather than in the typically dark, Gothic-churchy one.
The honeyed radiance of myrrh resin predominates at first, but soon, the scent shakes off this cozy mantle in favor of a flinty minerality, which smells to me very much like water running over moss-covered stones in a stream. With its unpretentious, earthy demeanor, Eau d’Iparie is the type of non-perfumey perfume that smells good to people for whom fragrance is a secondary ‘grooming’ thing rather than a full-on obsession.
America has Mandy Aftel, Australia has Teone Reinthal, and Europe has Annette Neuffer. I’m not sure why Annette doesn’t get the kind of attention that the other natural or indie perfumers do, but I suspect it has less to do with her natural talent than with her reluctance (as with many indie perfumers) to engage with the quid pro quo sleaze involved in the social media marketing and self-promotion that these days goes hand in hand with making and selling perfume.
If you want to see what Annette Neuffer can do, though, I beg you to try something like Avicenna Myrrha Mystica. She has a way of turning this rubbery, dense, semi-bitter resin into pure ether. Applying a balmy orange peel note to make the dusty myrrh bright and juicy, and surrounding the resin with a puffer jacket of velvety cocoa powder for comfort and depth, Neuffer feeds us a myrrh that’s been massaged into its most agreeable shape yet.
Mid-section, it develops a wonderfully damp (almost soggy) cardboard sweetness that reminds me a lot of Cocoa Tuberose by Providence Perfumery, and in fact, both scents share a soft, smudgy feel that is as sexy and endearing (to me) as the idea of Jeff Goldblum breathing on his spectacles to fog up the glass and clean them with the corner of his wooly sweater. Part cocoa powder, part flat Coca Cola, backlit with a dry hyraceum note that adds a faintly musky, funky quality to the myrrh.
But that orange peel persists, and that is what wins out in the end – a fresh, resinous orange (or perhaps a fresh, orange-tinted resin?). Either way, I find Avicenna Myrrha Mystica both utterly engrossing and a breeze to wear, and it is not often that you can say both things about myrrh, especially in an indie or all-natural take.
Alien
Essence Absolue is primarily a thick, rich floral vanilla but one in which a
dollop of bitter myrrh has been placed to keep things in balance. It smells
like bitter almonds, marzipan, and papery tobacco, all folded into a thick
vanilla and jasmine custard. When applied lightly or dabbed on, the cool, minty
anise of the myrrh emerges, backlighting the warm ambery vanilla. The jasmine
is so creamy and rich it almost takes on a coconut edge, briefly summoning up
the feel of a tropical gardenia. As an aside, the bottle is shaped like a butt.
And who doesn’t have shelf space for something shaped like a butt, I ask you sincerely?
Messe
de Minuit (Etro) – Sepulchral
Myrrh
I’d
always been puzzled when people would describe Messe de Minuit as a gloomy
fragrance, because until about a year ago, the only version with which I was
familiar was the modern one, which has been cleaned (and brightened) up so much
that none of the original descriptions of the scent made any sense. The latest
version of Messe de Minuit smells like a gloomy Italian cathedral with the
flood lights suddenly turned on and the doors thrown open to let the fresh air
in. It is an incredibly cheerful smell – bitter orange peel and mixed with the
lime-peel and pine brightness of unlit frankincense.
The older version, of which I now own a bottle, is a different story. Though still not quite as nihilistic as the very first version, the reaction to which saw Etro scuttling back to the drawing board to ‘fix’ it, the dour, fungal dampness of myrrh mixed with a powdery, spicy benzoin produces an aroma that recalls with a startling degree of accuracy the scent of cold stone floors, mildewy papers, and the slightly metallic, inert air of a closed-up sacristy. The chill of the myrrh is eventually warmed a little by the golden labdanum lolling around in the basenotes, but the scent never truly shakes off its central character of cold, dusty, ancient stone.
Though
I understand why not everyone wants to wear the smell of rising damp on a
sacristy wall (carrying with it the unsettling suggestion of neglect), you have
to give Messe de Minuit credit for making its wearer feel like they’ve been plunged
into a particularly dark Goya painting, and I am thinking here of the one where
Saturn is devouring his own son.
Myrrhe
et Délires (Guerlain) – Macaron
Myrrh
As I inch closer to collection completion (or the end of my ‘scent journey’), I have had to get very tough with my Guerlains. L’Heure Bleue, for example, doesn’t make it into my final edit (I’ll finish the small vintage parfum I have, as it is delightfully trashy and rich compared to the candied floral that is the current EdP), and, much as I enjoy wearing them from time to time, neither does Chamade,Tonka Impérial, Cuir Beluga, or the much vaunted Après L’Ondée. These are not the essential Guerlains for me.
Testing
Myrrhe et Délires under such conditions reveals my lines in the sand. A few
years ago, I would have forgiven this scent its flaccid body for its charming
violety-irisy topnotes, which smell like those lilac-colored macarons in the
window of Ladurée, or what I imagine the pastry scenes in Sofia Coppola’s Marie
Antoinette must have smelled like – all spun sugar, candied violets, and sugar
paste roses. If I had tested this during my violet phase, fuhgeddaboudit. Would
have sold my soul, probably.
But honestly, from where I’m sitting now, Myrrhe et Délires just doesn’t make the cut. Full marks, though, for rendering the bullish myrrh – a material whose darkish, mushroom-water tonalities usually drown delicate floral notes like candied violet – into a lace doiley’s worth of frothy anise and soft bready notes. Taken together, Myrrhe et Délires smells like Chowder’s violets and those soft black licorice rolls so mild that you could thumb them into the mouths of babies. But with great age comes wisdom; I can tell you that Guerlain’s own Black Perfecto is a much punchier, more emphatic spin on the same idea.
fallintostars(Strangelove
NYC) – Oudy
Myrrh
Review here. What I smell in fallintostars is really an act in three parts: Hindi oud, followed by champagne-and-vodka amber, and finally a huge honking myrrh not listed anywhere. Of course, it is entirely possible that Christophe has managed to work the inky, astringent tones of saffron and hina attar (henna) with his feverish fingers into the shape of a rubbery, mushroomy myrrh. It is also possible that it is just myrrh.
Bois
d’Argent (Dior Privée) – Woody
Myrrh
Aptly
named, Bois d’Argent is a creamy, smoky woods scent with a streak of silvery
iris running through it. The iris is here only to cut through the heaviness of the
other notes – a lump of levain mixed into a heavy bread dough – so most of its
lovely grey rootiness or butter tones are lost in the fray. However, without
the soulful lift of the iris note, I think this composition would be a heavy,
sodden mess – a dense genoise rather than angel food.
Bois
d’Argent is primarily a sticky myrrh scent to my nose. Myrrh is a tricky
material to work with in a perfume. Myrrh oil can be very bitter, mushroomy,
and ‘black’ in its favor profile, although I suspect that the perfumers went
more for the myrrh resin smell here, which is earthier, woodier, and sweeter
than the oil itself, which can smell very rubbery.
As
in similar fragrances such as Bois d’Iris (The Different Company) and Myrrhe
Ardente (Annick Goutal), the myrrh in Bois d’Argent is paired with a sweet
honey and vanilla pairing designed to tone down the bitterness of the oil, and
a polished woods basenote to play up the smokier notes of the resin. There is
also a faintly licorice-like note here, a note frequently matched to the anisic
qualities of myrrh oil.
There
is a crystalline texture to Bois d’Argent that I also note in Myrrhe Ardente,
like crunching on honey candies, the small ones you sometimes get with coffee
in Italian bars – they look and taste sweetly creamy, but quickly explode into
shards when you crunch down on them. And, as with the candies in question, myrrh,
when this sweetened, has the tendency to cloy.
For
this reason, I find Bois d’Argent striking but ultimately exhausting to wear.
The silvery iris and woods opening is beautiful, but the sweet vanilla in the base
is far too syrupy, and the myrrh just continues droning on in its monogrammed monologue
for hours on end, like the dinner guest who has zero self-awareness and thinks
that we will all be as fascinated by his role in corporate finance as he is. The
same complaint applies to Bois d’Iris and Myrrhe Ardente. There are times when
these fragrances work on me, but inevitably, something in them eventually clogs
up my airways and wears on my spirit.
Ilang Ilan (Mellifluence) – Tropical Myrrh
Ilang
Ilan bursts open with a pungent ylang note, vibrating at an especially evil
level of banana-and-petroleum fruitiness inherent to the material. But almost
immediately, this is counterparted by the chewy licorice snap of myrrh, whose
dark, anisic saltiness stuffs a cloth in the shouty mouth of that exuberant
ylang, telling it to calm the f&*k down. For a while, this is so good that
you wonder why ylang is ever paired with anything else other than an equally
pugnacious myrrh.
Alas,
it is an all too brief display of force. In the drydown, the ylang departs,
leaving only the mineralic, mushroomy facets of the myrrh to dominate. It
smells like water you’ve soaked ceps in. For myrrh fanatics, this might be a
boon. For the ylang enthusiasts, this will feel like bait-and-switch of the
worst kind.
However,
Ilang Ilan is worth at least a sample, especially if you’re into the excitement
of an action-packed opening. The leather, the rubber, the fuel, the
licorice…whoever said that tropical florals are not for men just haven’t tried
the right ones. There is no creamy, trembling banana custard here, and
certainly no tropical leis draped on Gaugin-esque island beauties. Instead,
this is ylang with the sinister shadow of myrrh standing over it, dagger in
hand.
1000
Kisses (Lush) – Marmalade
Myrrh
For once, Lush’s strategy of unceremoniously dumping a vat load of bolshy, untrimmed raw materials into a scent and letting them all duke it out actually works. The osmanthus takes the form of a cooked apricot jam spiced heavily with almond essence and cinnamon, making me think of boozy Christmas fruitcakes slathered in apricot jam and carefully wrapped in a layer of rolled-out marzipan. But if there is cooked citrus jam, then there is also something nicely fresh here, in the form of that metallic, juicy brightness that stains your fingers for hours after you’ve peeled a mandarin.
These layers of both juicy and jammy citrus interact with the dusty but headily spiced myrrh to accentuate the Coca Cola-ish aspects of the resin, complete with its dark ‘crunchy’ sweetness and joyful, nose-tickling fizz. If I could spread 1000 Kisses on a slice of toasted panettone, I totally would. A uniquely cheerful take on myrrh.
Myrrh
& Tonka (Jo Malone) –
Mass Market Myrrh
A stodgy almond Battenberg of a tonka bean cups a chewy licorice lace myrrh in its sweaty clasp, and they both drown in the disappointing chemical buzz that is the standard Jo Malone base. Pro: it is stronger than most Jo Malone scents and will last all day. Con: it is stronger than most Jo Malone scents and will last all day.
Sorry
to be bossy, but I’m really going to have to insist you disregard any reviews
you see for Thichila that make it out to be tremendously complex, floral,
incensey, old school, or even chypre-ish – it’s really none of those things.
Because Thichila is one of those perfumes that happens to be composed in an
Eastern style and uses complex-smelling, exotic naturals, many people – mostly
Westerners – may mistake its complexity for a matter of construction. As a
matter of fact, Thichila is simply one big bridge built between two massively
complex materials – a natural Thai oud oil and a big, rustic myrrh. These two
monoliths happen, in this case, to share a peculiarly rubbery-rooty-oily-anisic
character that makes it difficult to tell where one ends and the other takes
over. I find Thichila fascinating precisely because of this.
The
Thai oud smells charmingly like the inside of a party balloon or a bouncy
castle – plasticky, rubbery, with the far-off twang of trampled fairground straw
and sticky, jammy-fruity children’s handprints. It reminds me very much of one
of FeelOud’s more unusual-smelling oud oils, whose name I can’t recall
right now, but which smelled like the air that escapes from plastic lunchboxes
that you’re opening for the first time in three months when the new term is
starting.
At
some point, the sweet, plasticky rubber tube of oud rolls into the scent of
myrrh – gloomy and rubbery, but also sweet and crunchy, like giant golden sugar
crystals dipped in anise and spread in a hard, glittery paste across your skin.
I think Thichila is, on balance, a great perfume, but fair warning – you have
to love this particular style of oud oil and this particular
sort of myrrh for it to be a success for you. A very specific perfume, therefore,
for a very specific taste.
Sutera
Ungu (Agar Aura) – Myrrhic Oud
Some oud oils are so complex that they can display notes
such as mint, white flowers, honey, and ambergris without actually containing a
speck of these materials. In oud cannon, it is usually Chinese oud oils that
are known to feature notes of myrrh, but this is a great example of a myrrhic
oud oil that actually comes from one of my favorite oud terroirs, which is Malaysia.
Distilled from wood from the Terengganu region of Malaysia,
Sutera Ungu displays both characteristics from the fruity Crassna and the
typical Malaysian structure. Cutting past all the gobbledygook, what this means
is that there is a complex series of shifts from top to bottom, often
separating into two layers – smoke on top, and fruity leather beneath. Agarwood
from the Terengganu region is said to be particularly perfumey and rich, a
theory borne out by this oil.
Immediately,
I can smell smoke and fruited wood, backed by a smoky incense quality. Once the
saturnine drama of the opening settles a bit, it is possible to discern subtle
little gradients of color and tone. There are waves of freshly-stripped bark,
clear furniture polish, green apple skin, and fermenting dried fruit, all
dispersed within a boozy vapor akin to dried fruits soaking in brandy for
Christmas pudding. You get all this and more, filtered through a haze of
incense smoke.
As pure
oud oils go, this is perfumey in the way of an older Chanel extrait, and I am
thinking of vintage Coco Parfum in particular here (something about the rich
fruits in brandy feel). In the heart, the smoke parts to reveal an earthy myrrh
note, old wooden chests, and, darting through the darkness, the reddish iodine
snap of pure saffron threads soaked in oil. None of these materials exist in
Sutera Ungu as notes, you understand – just their nuance.
But the
show is not over just yet. In a whiplash move, the oil circles back on itself
to the dry, incensey woodsmoke that greeted the nose in the topnotes. Sutera
Ungu is a rich, complex, and thoroughly enjoyable Malaysian oil experience from
top to bottom. It is both an oud oil and a proper perfume in its own right. I
highly recommend Agar Aura oils to beginners because they are exceptionally
smooth, light-to-medium weight in terms of darkness and possessed of a depth of
flavor that does not sacrifice legibility.
L’Eau
Trois (Diptyque) – Piney
Myrrh
Most of the older Diptyques smell like ancient medicinal salves made out of crushing various barks, spices, and unguents down into a fiery yellow paste and applied to an open wound (Eau Lente, L’ Eau). L’ Eau Trois flips the trope a little, taking it outside to the sunburnt hillsides of Greece or Southern France where the healer combs up tufts of wild rosemary, pine needles, and mastic from the maquis, and uses his cocaine fingernail to dig out sticky yellow globules of myrrh and pine sap from ancient, shrubby trees bent over with age and wind, before singeing it all over a fire so that greenery takes on a burnt, bitter flavor, and mashing it all down to a paste in a pestle and mortar.
Smoky,
wild, and herbaceous, L’Eau Trois this is myrrh at its most confrontational. It
smells of incense, yes, but also of bitter greenery that will either kill you
or cure you if ingested. Less like a perfume than something born of the bowels
of the earth.
Balsamo della Mecca (Abdes Salaam Attar) – Sanctifying Myrrh
Two versions of this scent exist – an eau de parfum and an attar. Here I discuss the attar, which, to my nose, is distinguished by its use of myrrh.
Although the crepuscular darkness of the resins is essentially the same from eau de parfum to attar, Balsamo della Mecca attar has a very different texture and therefore a completely different feel. Whereas the original is so dry that it threatens to ignite on the skin at any moment, the attar is a concentrated tar, like molasses seeping from a rusty pipe. Dense, sticky fir balsam, myrrh, frankincense, cade, and who knows what else, all boiled down to a medicinal salve one might rub onto an infection. Despite its opacity, it feels purifying.
The
labdanum is downplayed in the attar, allowing the rubbery, fungal saltiness of
myrrh to take the spotlight. By corollary, the eau de parfum is dustier and
sweeter, thick with labdanum. Given its greater diffusiveness, the eau de
parfum has a spiritual, if not ecclesiastical, feel; the attar, on the other
hand, feels gothic and a little bit sinister. Put it this way – I would wear the eau de parfum to Midnight
Mass, and the attar to an exorcism.
Little Egypt (BPAL)– Honeyed Myrrh
Little
Egypt is a bright, resinous honey scent with a sharp green calamus note running
through it to keep things fresh. All the honeyed, sticky sweetness of myrrh has
been drawn out and emphasized in this scent, but none of its anisic or
earthy-mushroomy nuances. This makes for a very sweet blend indeed, but the
inherent smokiness of myrrh resin, plus that crisp calamus note, does a good
job of holding back the syrup. Myrrh fanatics may want to hunt this one down.
La
Myrrhe (Serge Lutens) – Elegant
Myrrh
Pairing the fatty, soapy aspect of myrrh with a spray of fatty, soapy aldehydes is genius because, like any solid marriage, they compensate for each other’s failings. The fizzy aldehydes lift the heavy resin up into space, exploding it into stardust, while the bitter, rubbery characteristics of myrrh add depth and drama to the lower register of aldehydes, lending it a rooty, sub-woofer substance just as the champagne bubbles begin to fade away. In the base, a creamy jasmine and sandalwood turn up to mitigate the ‘rubber ball’ astringency of the myrrh, essentially taking over the reins from the sweet, effervescent aldehydes.
Because the aldehydes in La Myrrhe smells very much like the kind used in Chanel No. 5 (fatty, soapy, waxy, slightly rosy), many people find it to resemble No. 5, though to my nose, it smells rather like Chanel No. 22 with its Fanta-and-incense-on-steroids mien – with one key difference. La Myrrhe has a lurid almond-cherry-ade aspect to it that reminds me of Cherry Coke, rather than Fanta. Picture a single candied cherry lifted from a jar of (cough) syrup and dropped into a bag of pure white soap powder, causing the powder to explode outwards and upwards like a cluster bomb.
La
Myrrhe is a sensational myrrh fragrance, and unfortunately hard to find these
days unless you live in Europe and can order direct from les Salons du
Palais Royal in Paris. It is worth the effort and expense, though, especially,
if you prefer the gauzier, more light-filled creations of Serge Lutens over the
stickier, fruitcake-and-incense ones, like Arabie, Fumerie Turque et al. With the
anisic, rubbery bitterness of the resin perfectly juxtaposed against the sweet,
frothy soapiness of aldehydes, La Myrrhe will appeal enormously to lovers of Douce
Amère, Chanel No. 5 Eau Première, Chanel No. 22, Guerlain Vega, Rêve d’Ossian
by Oriza L. Legrand, and Miriam by Tableau de Parfums (Tauer).
Mirra
(Acqua di Parma) – Ambroxan
Myrrh
Myrrh
my ass. This is Acqua di Parma halfway down the slide from its once glorious
position at the top of classic Italian heritage to the mosh pit of
bro-pandering the brand is currently strutting around in. A flurry of citrus
and herbs in the opening 0.02 seconds of Mirra convinces me that nothing is
unforgivable and maybe the brand can claw its way back, but this is quickly
drowned in that unnatural concoction that greets me in so many of the ‘perfumes
for the modern man’ these days – a vile and droning medley of synthetically
radiant Ambroxan or Iso E Super drowned in enough ambery syrup to fell a horse
at ten paces.
It depresses me that the bones of Sauvage are everywhere, lurking in even the oldest, most heritage-y of heritage brands, waiting to pop out at me. For all that Luca Turin lauds Italian perfumery as being where it’s at these days, most young passers-by – women and men, professional or preppy – that I smell in Rome smell like this rather than of invigorating lemons of Santa Maria Novella or something cool by Antonio Alessandria.
For me, Mirra is nothing more than sweet, sugared woods inflated with enough Ambroxan to send a thousand chemical ice picks aimed at my head, but for anyone not as sensitized to these woody alcohols, it probably comes across as something gorgeously fresh, clean, and well, radiant. I can see the appeal of stuff like this for those who do not pick up on the awful grimness of those modern aromachemicals. But I feel personally attacked by Mirra and the 967 other modern masculines that smell virtually identical.
Iranzol
(Bruno Acampora) – Anachronistic
Myrrh
Iranzol
is a perfectly-preserved time capsule of a time in perfumery when perfumers
were free to use the stinkiest of floral absolutes, plant oils, and resins in
their perfumes. Iranzol smells like the seventies, which makes perfect sense
because it was launched
in the seventies. What is extraordinary is that the formula seems to have
remained unchanged since then; this is the perfume in its original form. In a
day and age when brands reformulate every few years to keep up with IFRA
recommendations, it is a small wonder that something like Iranzol can and does
still exist.
The opening is as damply mushroomy as Acampora’s own Musc, brimming with wet soil, freshly-cut mushrooms, raw patchouli oil, and possibly some salty Italian kitchen herbs, like dried lavender and fennel root. There is definitely myrrh in the blend somewhere, helping those wet earth notes along.
Clove
is also suspected, because there is an accord here that is half-claggy,
half-dusty, like the sour, unwashed smell of sheets folded away while still
damp. This accord is both medicinal (clean) and animalic (unwashed, dusty,
stale), which, although not entirely pleasant to my nose, is effective at
creating an atmosphere of gloomy, faded grandeur. One imagines a dusty chaise
longue in an abandoned mansion by the sea somewhere.
The
drydown diverges from the central accords found in Musc by finishing up in a
dry amber and sandalwood base. It retains, as most of Acampora’s oils do, that
brusque connection to the earthier, more aromatic smells of the seventies, when
men wore either Jovan Musk or barbershop fougères and shaved with proper soap.
In other words, the sandalwood is dry and astringent, and the amber vegetal. No
cream, sugar, or butter anywhere in sight. You might have to adjust your
television set when attempting Iranzol for the first time – it is neither
modern nor easy. It is an anachronism, an earthy scent for those who like the
pungent, untouched smells of nature and their fellow human beings.
Sirocco (Solstice Scents) – Caveman Myrrh
First,
a sunburst of saffron, its astringent aroma redolent of hay, leather, and
iodine. This quickly gives way to the mitti, which smells of wet soil rather
than the dry earth of true Indian mitti. Last to emerge is the rubbery,
mushroomy myrrh, which smells like the plain essential oil one picks up at the
health store, i.e., bitter, saline, and musty. The myrrh dominates the scent
completely; once it pops its head around the door, it is here for breakfast,
lunch, and dinner.
In short, don’t trust the scent description given by the company – Sirocco is not the hot, dry ‘desert’ scent billed in the description, but instead, given the prominent role of the myrrh, the fungal scent of caves. If you like the wet, sepulchral side of myrrh, and earthy, medicinal smells in general, then you will love Sirocco. If you are specifically looking for dry heat, deserts, and sand, look elsewhere.
Myrrhe Ardente (Annick Goutal) – Root Beer Myrrh
A dry spackle of resin at first, golden, crunchy, and slightly herbal – austere enough to wear to the bank – that becomes steadily stickier and gummier with a heavy pour of tonka, amber, and honey. When I wear this, I can almost feel the myrrh crystallizing in huge chunks on my arm, thick enough to smash out into a resinous paste.
There is also a nigh-on-bitter smack of cherry cough syrup floating against something medicinally creamy, which is essentially what Americans know as the ‘root beer float’ flavor – this is a pronounced characteristic of myrrh that comes out to play a lot anywhere there is amber or vanilla.
I would place this in the same group as Myrrhiad, i.e., a dry-creamy myrrh amber thickened up with lots of licorice-scented vanilla in the background, designed to soothe and cosset rather than excite. I sold my bottle a long time ago, however, once I began to perceive a piercing woody aromachemical note that ran rampant all over the scent’s original ‘weighted blanket’ premise.
Cashmiri
Black (Agarscents Bazaar) – Coca
Cola Myrrh
Cashmiri Black is a wonderfully odd mukhallat that nudges Agarscents Bazaar out of its comfort zone of Indian-style musks and ambers, and into a slightly more ‘niche’ perfume area. The blend opens with an accord that smells like salted buckwheat honey or molasses smeared over pieces of hardcore Scandinavian licorice, shot through with plumes of sooty fireside smoke. Black pepper, oily and pungent, explodes all over, recalling several modern Comme des Garcons efforts such as Black Pepper and Black.
A
firecracker dose of saffron soon joins the fray, streaking across the dark
canvas created by a fusion of tarry, resinous myrrh, creating an effect that is
half Idole (Lubin) and half Nesquik-y Darbar attar. There is a faintly fizzy
Coca Cola effect providing lift in the background. Thanks to the myrrh, the
texture is chewy and medicinal, with a hard-boiled, anisic blackness. It is
smoky and cocoa-dry, but this syrupy facet lends a nice textural counterpoint.
Cashmiri grows drier and smokier as time wends on, finishing up the ride as a tinder-box mixture of fiery cedarwood, myrrh, powdery (chocolate) musk, malty licorice, and charred woods. Cashmiri Black is an excellent alternative to expensive Arabian style niche smoke-and-resin bombs such as Black Afgano or Black Gemstone.
Parfum Sacre (Caron)
– Cashmere Myrrh
Parfum Sacre is one of those perfumes that I find hard to write about because it hooked me early, at a tender time of my life when I needed a Big Perfume Love, and therefore is utterly resistant to any attempt at objective analysis.
If pushed, I would say it smells like an ancient carved sandalwood chest filled to the brim with myrrh resin reduced to a fine golden powder and tender pink curlicues of rose soap loving carved off a block of Camay with a pocketknife. It smells full and soft, like cashmere, but studded with little kitten licks of black pepper and lemon that trickle the back of the throat.
The myrrh is fuzzy and warm, especially in the round-bellied vintage eau de parfum, where only its muted fatty-soapy-waxy facets have been coaxed out. In the modern eau de parfum, the myrrh smells sharper, more astringent, and woodier, thanks to the vigorous dosing of black pepper to compensate for the lower quality of sandalwood. Best of all, perhaps, is the salty, golden radiance sent in by natural ambergris to lift the myrrh and woods in the now discontinued Parfum.
But even the thin, reedy version of Parfum Sacre available to buy today possesses that gently pepper, rosy, soapy quality that says ‘Mother’ to me. It therefore continues to be one of my Big, Albeit Incoherently Described Perfume Loves.
Yes,
Myrrhe Impériale is impressively loud and rich and voluminous. But once you get
past the clattering noise of the opening – oiled galoshes, radiating resin,
treacly licorice – you realize that it is not much more than a powerful
fruitcake amber dressed up with so much Amber Xtreme or Norlimbanol that even a
knuckle daub’s worth is unbearable. It is like a large, expensively dressed man
whose braying laugh and physical volume seems to swell to fill the entire room,
impregnating all the available air pockets until you feel you will still be
able to hear/smell/taste him from two countries away. These niche behemoths are
designed to be impress you at ten paces, steam-rolling over any distinguishing
features other than its own powerful, magnetic radiance. An olfactory Charles
Atlas. Meh.
Sources
of Samples/Bottles:All
reviews above are based on samples, decants, or full bottles that I have
purchased with my own money, swapped for with friends, or tested in store. My
blog is not monetized, I make no money from my content, and if you want to
quote me or a piece of my writing, go right ahead (just please credit me as the
source). I am neither a shill nor an unpaid marketing arm of a brand, i.e., I
do not accept free bottles or samples in return for a positive review. If I
like something, or find something interesting, then I will write about it. You
might not always like my opinions, but you may trust that they are mine and
mine alone.
Mining the same marshmallow-meets-campfire vein as By the Fireplace by Maison Martin Margiela, albeit only about a hundred times more pleasant and natural-smelling, Blackmail captures that exciting feeling of anticipation your tummy gets at a country fair, the promise of something deep-fried and sugary vibrating on the air like a wind chime.
The luscious berry-tipped incense topnote is a cruel tease – smell it once and then it’s gone, but not before introducing the central block of fruit-over-smoked-oakwood that hangs around for the rest of the ride.
Though distinguished by a wonderfully sour streak of sodden, fermenting oud chips, Blackmail eventually settles into a shape not a million miles away from Broken Theories. They don’t smell alike note for note, but make no mistake – these guys happily fill the same gap in a well-curated wardrobe.
My own personal preferences lean more towards sandalwoody woodsmoke than burnt marshmallow, so I’m currently only tempted by Broken Theories. But, honestly, either would do in a pinch for when I am craving something sweet n’ smoky in that slightly blocky style of Kerosene. And that, really, is my one bone to pick with Blackmail and all fragrances like it. They are always more set pieces – big wooden panels you move around in each scene to achieve a specific effect – than the kind of thing that sets the imagination alight. Mind you, that’s not to say, as we limp across the finish line of 2020, that there isn’t value to walking around with your own personal country-fair-meets-campfire soundtrack playing on a constant loop over your head.
R’Oud Elements is a total wow for me – just wow! Pairing a bitter orange note (itself lurching charmingly from the naturalness of a freshly-peeled orange to the artificiality of a vitamin C drink) with a savory sandalwood standing in for oud, it has much the same effect as Many Aftel’s Oud Luban, in that it throws open the windows and floods a dark material (oud) with citrusy light.
R’Oud
Elements turns the traditional treatment of oud – almost reverential, lengthening
the shadows of its dankness with similarly deep, brown flavors, or countering
them with truffled rose notes – on its head, making it sing out in hot
orange-gold tones. R’Oud Elements is so bright it’s blinding – fizzy, zesty,
and slightly mineralic. It smells like someone spilled freshly-squeezed orange juice
on a grungy old brown leather sofa, which is all the better for it. The scent
stops just short of achieving maximum creamsicle, the bitter orange never quite
bridging it all the way to the creaminess set free by the sandal in the base.
But feel good? God, yes.
Many people on Fragrantica say that this smells like M7 (Yves Saint Laurent), one of the first commercial fragrances in the West to feature oud. And I suppose that’s fair, though it is the sour, nutty mealiness of cedarwood (or even vetiver), rather than amber, painting an exotic picture of oudiness here. But what this reminds of the most – in effect, if not smell – is that low-high contrast between the aromatic, fizzy ‘dustiness’ of Italian herbs and the satiny, sour-cream umami-ness of sandalwood that runs through much of Lorenzo Villoresi’s work, particularly that of Sandalo and Musk. Something about the rub of something sharp or aromatic (saffron, lavender, orange peel) against something tartly lactonic (musk, sandalwood), fleshed out by an intensely powdery cedar, creates in all three scents the impression of cream lightly curdled by a squirt of lemon juice.
If
I didn’t already own Musk (Lorenzo Villoresi) and vintage Sandalo
(Etro) to satisfy my aromatic tart-sour-creamy woody needs, I would be setting
my cap hard at R’Oud Elements. As it is, I’m still thinking about
R’Oud Elements long after my sample is gone.
Source
of Sample: I purchased my
Kerosene samples from the wonderful Polish website Lulua. I have used Lulua many times over the
past five years to sample American or Canadian indies, such as Slumberhouse,
Zoologist, Olympic Orchids, and now, Kerosene, which can be extremely difficult
for European customers to track down and smell. I am 100% happy to recommend
Lulua, because they provide a terrific service for not too much money, have the
best packaging I’ve ever seen for samples-only orders, and they always throw in
a few extras too.
Sometimes
you want a silky pâté that rolls around velvetily in your mouth for a few
seconds before dissolving into perfumed air, and sometimes you want the thick,
meaty savor of a butcher’s organic pork sausage slathered in fried onions and enough
hot yellow mustard to guarantee a ruined shirt. Copper Skies is the pork
sausage of the amber genre.
Cleverly
balancing the gooey resinousness of amber and tobacco with a close-fitting
sheath of basil that splits the difference between mint and black licorice, it scratches
my itch for the kind of big, gutsy flavors that make my mouth throb and my
heart sing. The amber smells more like incense to me, with a rich, deep sort of
bitterness that probably originates with the tobacco leaf. Worth noting that Copper
Skies doesn’t smell particularly like tobacco leaf to me per se, probably
because the usual cinnamon and dried fruits aspect is missing, replaced by that
surprisingly fresh, anisic topnote. But there is a chewy, toasty quality to
Copper Skies that certainly hints at tobacco.
Copper
Skies is not what you’d call refined, but that’s the point. Its flashes of industrial
rubber wiring, sharp incense, and hot metal are what keep my salivary glands
pumping and the juices running unchecked down my chin. It turns on a coin; sometimes
it smells like just another rich, sweet incensey amber (quite Amber
Absolute-like), and other times like a herbal, leafy thing that has more in
common with licorice root tea than resin.
Amber
is one of those accords that smells so good in and of itself that that it is
difficult to innovate on the theme without losing the plot somewhere. The more of
them I smell, the more I appreciate the ones that retain the affability of
amber while doing something quirky and original to keep us all from slumping
over into that over-stated torpor that follows a rich pudding. Copper Skies is not
particularly subtle or ‘worked out’, but to my mind, it absolutely succeeds in
giving you the full satisfaction of amber without sending you to sleep.
Broken
Theories
Broken
Theories speaks directly to my fantasy of trekking home through snowy woods towards
my rustic-but-architect-designed log cabin, in Fair Isle leggings that
miraculously don’t make my legs look like two ham hocks in a sack, a
Golden lab at my side, and the pink-tinged winter sky above my head tilting slowly
towards indigo. A thread of sweet, tarry woodsmoke – from a far-off campfire,
perhaps, or even the wood burning stove lit by my husband, Mads Mikkelsen – hangs
in the cold, crisp air.
Pause and there is the heady scent of scattered forest homes gearing up for the night. Someone is revving their jeep to check if the winter tires are ok. Someone else is smoking a cigar while peeling an orange. Someone is smoking vanilla pods in their shed for some fancy artisanal market niche I’m not aware of. There’s an illicit coal fire in the mix too – not terribly environmental, the neighbors bitch, while surreptitiously gulping in lungfuls of the familiar charred scent of their childhood like junkies.
But the best thing about these aromas in that they are too far off in the distance to distinguish as one thing or another. Sandalwood, leather, oud, tobacco, vanilla, woodsmoke, burning sugar, dried kelp, and tar all melt down into one delicious aroma that is definitely more a collective of environmental ‘smells’ than perfume.
I love Broken Theories and really want a bottle. But the sweet woodsmoke-campfire genre is a crowded one, and bitter experience compels me to be clear-eyed about where this fits in the pecking order. First of all, let me admit that Broken Theories smell very, very indie, and by indie, I mean it smells like a number of popular woodsmoke perfume oils from companies such as Solstice Scents (especially Manor, Manor Fire, Grey’s Cabin, and Inquisitor) and Alkemia (especially Smoke and Mirrors and Fumé Oud à la Vanille). I’m fine with the association but all the same, the indie vanilla-woodsmoke theme (a) does tend to smell a bit samey from brand to brand, (b) is gummily (albeit enjoyably) indistinct, like several woodsmoke stock oils or ‘house notes’ thrown into a jerrycan, and (c) doesn’t carry quite the same degree of elegance as a masstige or luxury perfume featuring woodsmoke, e.g., Bois d’Armenie by Guerlain or Bois d’Ascèseby Naomi Goodsir. That I smell this type of ‘indie-ness’ in the vanilla-woodsmoke aspect of Broken Theories makes me hesitate.
However, I can think of many other perfumes – some of them luxury, some of them prestigious indies -that Broken Theories beats into a corner with a stick, and on balance, that tips the whole decision into the yes direction. For example, while I like Fireside Intense (Sonoma Scent Studio), it is too bitter-smoky for me to wear on the regular without me feeling like I am wearing a hair shirt. Bois d’Ascèse has a similar problem, in that there is a harsh woody aromachemical in the base that makes wearing it a chore – there is no such problem in Broken Theories, which beds down the tougher smoke and oud-leather notes in a balmy vanilla softness that feels as comfy as those fantasy Fair Isle leggings. And Broken Theories is infinitely preferable to the popular By the Fireplace (Marson Martin Margiela), a perfume whose sharp, burnt sugar and viscous campfire or wood aromachemical makes me physically nauseous.
Broken Theories is, however, not as good as Jeke (Slumberhouse) or Black No. 1 (House of Matriarch), other perfumes with a strong campfire or woodsmoke element. But it is cheaper, lighter, and easier to obtain. It is roughly similar – both in quality and execution – to the wonderful Winter Woods by Sonoma Scent Studio, and by process of elimination, I guess I’ve narrowed it down to a choice between this and that.
Conclusion: Broken Theories is one of the best woodsmoke scents on the market today. But it only makes sense if you don’t already have a plethora of other woodsmoke scents to fill that particular niche. My fantasy self and I will be having words.
Source
of Sample: I purchased my
Kerosene samples from the wonderful Polish website Lulua. I have used Lulua many times over
the past five years to sample American or Canadian indies, such as Slumberhouse,
Zoologist, Olympic Orchids, and now, Kerosene, which can be extremely difficult
for European customers to track down and smell. I am 100% happy to recommend Lulua,
because they provide a terrific service for not too much money, have the best packaging
I’ve ever seen for samples-only orders, and they always throw in a few extras
too.
Ormonde Jayne set out its mission and values in its original core collection, and to this day, it remains the standard bearer for the brand. I’ve written about some of the perfumes in the Ormonde Jayne core collection before, but since I’ve been reevaluating much of my collection recently, I thought it might be useful to update or expand upon my thoughts.
In general, my unscientific belief that Ormonde Jayne is the English Chanel bears out. This is solidly-built, almost classical perfumery with a modern elegance derived from strong artistic direction and an admirably no-nonsense approach to the valuable role synthetics play in elevating naturals.
One thing I have noticed this time around is that the literal names – Champaca, Ta’if, Frangipani, and so on – are a Le Labo-ish piece of misdirection, suggestive of a soliflore-ism that simply isn’t there. Words have power, so there will always be those disappointed if the titular ingredient isn’t headlining the whole show. But on the flip side, newcomers to the brand who are able to park their expectations at the door may find their minds blown by the beauty arrived at via more circuitous routes.
Champaca
Champaca is a scent whose appeal
eludes many. But you know what? Half the time it eludes me too. On its bad
days, many of the slurs thrown its way worm their way into my head and nag
persistently at me with the worry that they might be true – that Champaca is nothing
special, that it’s too champaca or not champaca enough, that it’s
nondescript, that it’s a dowdy green floral that Calvin Klein’s Truth
did better and cheaper. Then there’s its musky loudness, which I always forget
until I get called out on it by a colleague who is never backward about coming
forward on the subject of my perfume.
But on good days, Champaca is the
gently starched air from a bowl of Chinese greens and the damp, permeating
nuttiness of brown basmati rice. It makes me think of stepping in from a cold,
rainy afternoon in Cork or Limerick into the wood-lined hush of a traditional
Japanese restaurant, slightly steamy from condensation and humming with low
conversations.
I don’t understand the accusations of tropical yellow flowers or heady ambers in relation to Champaca. It is not even a particularly floral experience. To me, Champaca smells more like the fresh green peel of a Granny Smith apple rinsed with rainwater than a flower. Yes, technically, this all might be unexciting. The scent of an upscale Japanese onsen or spa is never really going to raise the barometer on anyone’s passion. But when I am feeling delicate, or in need of a friendly hand at the small of my back, then Champaca, with its gossamer-light bloom of starchy musks, rice steam, apple peel, watery bamboo, maybe mint, and the environmental exhalations of clean, blond wood, is what I find myself reaching for.
Orris Noir
I originally invested in Orris
Noir as a poor man’s substitute for the far more expensive Tsarina, having
identified a creamy-milky, anisic iris as the underpinning to both. Now, after
taking the time to study both at leisure, I can say that while Tsarina is by
far the creamiest, more luxurious ‘white’ leather scent I have ever smelled, in
retrospect it doesn’t turn me on as much as Orris Noir, which, although less ‘beautiful’
than Tsarina, has more conversation.
Orris Noir has three or four
distinct layers. The first is a doughy iris as dense as under-proved bread
dough studded with dried fruit. A couple of years on, I now smell this as a
rosy iris bread that’s been soaked in sweet milk, like the egg-rich Easter crown
baked once a year in the Balkans. The second layer is an anisic myrrh with the
same crystallized texture as found in other myrrh scents such as Myrrhe Ardente,
albeit more golden and less overtly itchy-scratchy. The third layer is a minimally
smoky cloud of wood or incense that lifts the perfume and makes it radiant
(probably a combination of the Iso E Super and the Chinese cedar). Last but not
least, there’s a bright, fruity jasmine that fizzes as sweetly as a glass of
freshly-poured Coca Cola. Somehow, all of these elements hang together as
naturally and as lightly as a silk shawl.
Orris Noir is a fantastic advertisement for the Ormonde Jayne style of building a fragrance, in that it is composed of many different layers, all of them as light as air, but which when laid one on top of another become a dense, velvety mass. I love Orris Noir for what it is – a beguilingly soft spice oriental – rather than hate it for what it is not, i.e., noir or even orris. Indeed, if Ormonde Jayne had named it something else, Orris Noir might have gained the respect granted to other similarly soft, hazy resinous-floral orientals such as Bois d’Argent (Dior) or Jasmin de Nuit (The Different Company). This is one perfume in my collection that has improved greatly upon (re)acquaintance.
Frangipani Absolute
Frangipani Absolute is at least accurately
named, given that it smells more like the absolute than the living flower. The
absolute smells green and waxy, like a nubbin of beeswax rolled in matcha
powder; the living flower, which I had the opportunity of smelling for the
first time in Colombia last summer, smells a bit like jasmine but without the
indole and grape, and there is a buttery undertone that I associate with gardenia,
minus the heavy bleu cheese aspects.
Frangipani Absolute freshens the waxy-green heft of the absolute by filtering it through lime and linden blossom, creating the impression of hothoused tropical flowers drenched in ice water and the glass partitions thrown open to salty sea air. The brightness of this topnote is undercut later on by the lush creaminess of the living flower, embodied by an accord that smells like a dairy-heavy rice and coconut pudding made out of tuberose petals, with pools of yellow Irish butter rising to the surface. A subtly salty musk and clean cedar hum in the far background, mainly there for support in case the almost unrelenting brightness of the lime-drenched white flowers falters.
Cleverly, the perfumer has made the floral component very peachy, to mimic the peachy jasmine-like aura of the living flower. Frangipani is therefore blessed with a suede-skin note that smells charmingly like the back of a rubber watch on a sweaty child. The scent shifts between these three main accords – green-aqueous-fresh, peachy-rubber, and creamy-buttery-tuberose – without ever getting pulled too far down in one single direction. That’s some balancing act.
Frangipani Absolute is an undeniably
beautiful scent, and an interesting take on a flower that often plays second
fiddle to more powerful headliners such as gardenia or tuberose. My hesitation on
whether it stays in my collection or not stems from several different quarters.
First, the salty, quasi-aquatic
musk in the drydown reminds me very much of Lys Méditerranée (Malle), already a wardrobe staple
for me, which makes me wonder if it’s not duplicative to have two scents that represent
largely the same ‘feel’, i.e., heady white flowers drenched in dew and the
salty air rolling in off the ocean. The occasions when I feel the need for this
precise combination are few and far between, therefore surely it is redundant for
me to have two separate fragrances at the ready when this tight little niche
corner of my ‘need’ rears its head.
Second, Frangipani is so pretty
and well-presented that it makes me feel slightly uncouth in comparison.
Worse, the prettiness reminds me of the golden, solar fruity-floral ‘glazed
eyes’ affair that is J ’Adore (Dior), which is fine if you’re wearing
something you can pick up from any Sephora or Douglas, but not great if you’re
special ordering from a classy niche brand like Ormonde Jayne.
Third, the brightness of the lime-and-peach-hued white flowers feels a little too sharp and insistent at times, like when you neck that syrupy but metallic juice from a tin of canned tropical fruit. In other words, absolutely gorgeous at first but perhaps wearing a little on your nerves towards the last? Along the same lines of complaint (minor, but still), the vanilla tuberose pudding base flirts with heaviness; it clashes a little queasily with the citric acid of the lime, to the extent that it teeters on the precipice of a curdle.
Out of all the Ormonde Jayne scents I own, Frangipani Absolute is the one I agonize over the most. Do I need it? No. Does its classical (but slightly mainstream) beauty justify me keeping it? Maybe. But the fact that I swing between a yes and a no on this scent, personally, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t rank among the top tier of tropical floral perfumes I’ve had the pleasure of smelling.
Tolu
Despite not being wowed at first
sniff, I have come around to the pleasures of Tolu. It has a bitter, spicy
broom note that slices through the golden, balsamic sweetness of amber to
create something that is both fresh and heavy, like a flourless chocolate torte
that dissolves into fennel dust on the tongue. The kind of thing that invites
you to take a second slice, even in summer. I can see this working as a sort of
upmarket Dune. In that sense, this is definitely a floral oriental rather than
a straight up ‘golden’ amber. It certainly doesn’t maintain a strict tolu
balsam fidelity. Rather, Tolu has that sophisticated French floral-sandy feel
to it that I associate not only with Dune (Dior) but also with 24,
Rue Faubourg (Hermes), albeit with the innovation of a sweetly resinous base
to tilt it ever so slightly in the direction of Morocco rather than Paris.
The more I wear Tolu, the more I appreciate its subtlety. I used to prefer the caramelized full frontal of one-the-nose resin bombs and ambers to the almost too quiet, too ‘mixed’ cloud of balsams, orange blossom, and musks represented by Tolu. But Tolu is, I realize, a mood. It is very perfumey meaning it’s been worked and reworked to the same point of abstraction as Coco (Chanel), Dune (Dior) or even Alahine (Teo Cabanel).
Tolu is the quintessential going out perfume for nights along the Riviera, where women and men are beautifully dressed and the warm air smells like a mixture of flowers, salty skin, and the balsamic twang of Mediterranean herbs and umbrella pines lining the promenade. It’s easy to argue that there’s nothing very unusual about Tolu, but what it does, it does extremely well. I will always have space in my wardrobe for this perfumey, French-smelling take on the warm, golden balsams I love rinsed out with flowers, salt, and herbs.
Tiaré
For a while, my interest in
Ormonde Jayne stopped with OJ Woman, a perfume I’d struggled with for years
before finally falling in love with it. That was, until one day a couple of
years ago, I fished around in my sample box looking for something crisp and
green to go well with a planned walk in a nearby castle grounds with my children
and stumbled upon Tiaré.
Its lack of anything truly tiaré-like or tropical puzzled me at first. But I remember marveling at the champagne-like quality of the lime and green notes fizzing gently around the oily but fresh white flower petals. The damp, mossy drydown proved to be a perfect reflection of the elegance of the castle lake and grounds. There is something pinned-up and Victorian in its mien – not entirely me, but rather someone I aspire to be. It was the first sample from the Ormonde Jayne sample set that I drained completely. Whereupon I forgot about it entirely.
Fast forward to Summer 2017, which is when, while sweating our way through the forests and fields of the Sologne and Loiret, I decided that, really, nothing was more French or more crisply elegant than Tiaré, and that I desperately needed a bottle of it. Tiaré would be, I’d decided, my entry point to a new life in France that, although it never actually materialized, was the Big Plan in our family at the time, to the point of flying the kids out to various French cities in an attempt to decide where we would settle.
The firm belief that a life in
France calls for a thoroughly ‘French’ perfume (as if my collection wasn’t
already 75% made up of so-called French perfume) is why I am now the proud
possessor of a totally unnecessary 120mls of Tiaré. (I am perennially guilty of
daydreaming my life forward and allowing my purchases to lead the way. In 2018,
I was so convinced that I was going to be hired by a British not-for-profit to
manage their programs in Myanmar that I got emotionally invested in Indochine
by Parfumerie Generale, a perfume based on Burmese thanaka wood. I didn’t get
the job, but you bet I bought a bottle of Indochine. I don’t even want to say
how many ‘Roman’ perfumes were necessary for me to settle into a new life in
Italy.)
Anyway, back to Ireland in these early, post-Coronavirus times and Tiaré, like Cristalle (Chanel), doesn’t really suit the damp, cool conditions. Yet I am loathe to get rid of Tiaré, because, God knows, I will probably need it for when we finally move to France. In which case, I will also need the quintessential cognac-colored leather shopper, very pointy ballet flats, a chic haircut, and a perfectly-cut navy blazer. So, I guess I’d better start shopping now….
Ormonde Jayne Woman
Woman occupies a place in my personal pantheon of greats, but the route to loving her has not been easy. In fact, I have struggled with this perfume on and off for years. I imagine that, for people like me, with biological sensitivities to certain materials, getting past Woman’s many thorns is like loving someone who is beautiful but difficult.
Initially, my nose was so sensitive to the combination of woody ambers, sticky pine, and Iso E Super that the only notes I could smell were acrid, burnt, metallic – like burnt fuses and the La Roche Posay medicated acne cream. These unfortunate associations, plus the physical sensation I had of an ice-cold shiv driving into the tender recesses of my brain, are what made me keep my sample of Woman at a safe distance from my nose, wrapped twice in cling film and double-bagged.
Every so often, over the years, I
would take out that sample of Woman and tentatively sniff. Now, here’s the
strangest thing. As my exposure to the violent woody ambers and brutal Iso E
Super used increasingly in niche increased, so too did my tolerance. I don’t
mean that I started to like them, but rather that their presence no longer
obscured large parts of a composition for me. This meant that perfumes such as Indochine
(Parfumerie Generale), Musc Nomade (Annick Goutal), and Ormonde Jayne Woman
were now ‘unlocked’ for me. I could smell all parts of these perfumes rather
than slivers.
Having said that, progress was gradual. For example, for about six months, although I could smell all parts of Woman, all depth perception dropped off after about an hour or two, leading me to believe (mistakenly) that the perfume had simply stopped in its tracks. I now believe that this was due to the type of woody ambers used, some of which have a curious side effect of making a scent seem to disappear and then come back, over and over again, throughout a day’s wear. Ambroxan can have this odd ‘receding and resurging’ effect too; I sense it most keenly in Amouage Jubilation XXV, which my husband says he wears for other people because he himself cannot smell it after an hour (to his family, it seems quite big and room-filling).
Anyway, the reason I’m waffling on about this odd facet of Woman is that reviews are the little markers we drop along our journey, in the hope that they serve as clues to fellow travelers years down the road, right? I remember smelling Indochine and doing a Google search for something along the lines of ‘Why does Indochine smell like an ice pick to my brain?’ and stumbling across Kafkaesque’s review, which was the first source of answers for me as to why some materials were physically obtrusive to my nose yet imperceptible to others. I felt seen. I hope that someone struggling with Ormonde Jayne Woman finds their way to this review and gets comfort from knowing that they’re not alone, and that there might be a rational explanation for not immediately jiving with one of the most renowned perfumes in modern niche.
There’s light at the end of the tunnel, folks, there really is. Now when I smell Ormonde Woman, I smell the whole forest, the sugared smoke of gingerbread crumbs thrown onto the fire, and the inky mass of woodland violets and hemlock rolled out underfoot, and Scarlett O’ Hara’s dark green velvet gown made out of curtains and fury.
At heart, Ormonde Woman is a nugget of amber surrounded by tall conifers and hemlock, but its mysterious appeal can’t be explained by its notes or even how we think they all hang together. Woman is one of those perfumes you submit to, body and soul, without much hope of ever picking it apart. It took me years to be able to smell all parts of it but now when I wear Ormonde Jayne Woman now, I smell it all, and what I smell makes me breathe deep and easy.
Osmanthus
Osmanthus is not my favorite osmanthus-themed scent in the Ormonde Jayne stable (that would be Qi), but it is surely the prettiest. Osmanthus explores the softly soapy, ‘clean linen’ side of the bloom that marks it out more as vaguely cherry blossom than the pungent fruity apricot suede trope often plumbed in niche.
In fact, aside from a vaguely peachy or apricotty tinge in the topnotes, Osmanthus sidesteps its namesake ingredient and goes for pomelo peel and white petals plunged into ice water and polished to a high shine by radiant aquatic musks. It smells pleasantly cooling, like a tall glass of lemonade or the feel of fresh cotton on hot skin.
Think of it this way; if Qi is an apricot-colored suede pouch filled with green tea, then Osmanthus is a white broderie anglaise sundress and a pair of straw espadrilles strung over one perfectly tan shoulder.
All very nice but running a little too close to one of those Atelier Cologne citrus-and-cotton-musk scents for comfort. I always thought that Osmanthus would smell more ‘at home’ in the form of a body care product than a perfume, and it turns out I was right; the Osmanthus Hair Mist is lovely. Warmer and peachier than the perfume – to my nose at least – the pert, perfumey prettiness of Osmanthus makes more sense to me when spritzed through second day hair. It is still much girlier than I am, but at least in this form, it just creates the manifest lie impression that I am freshly bathed and impeccably groomed.
Ta’if
Ta’if is one of those fragrances
where I seem to be experiencing something completely different to everyone
else. People use the words ‘rich’, ‘dark’, and ‘exotic’ to describe it, which
suggests a texture as heavy as velvet – close to Lyric Woman (Amouage) or
Portrait of a Lady (Malle). But reality is miles removed. On my skin, Ta’if
reads as a sheer peppery mixed floral layered over a musky, dried-fruit base. Neither
the advertized dates nor Taifi rose show up for me, or at least not in any form
I recognize (when I see ‘Ta’if’ rose, I expect a pop of fiercely spicy, green lemon-and-lime
sharpness announcing a tannic rose).
In fact, I’d rank Ta’if alongside Rose Noir (Miller Harris) and Tobacco Rose (Papillon) as rose fragrances that bill themselves as one thing and then deliver another. Clearly, the sheer amount of admiration and positive reviews out there for Ta’if and Tobacco Rose demonstrates that it is possible not only to get over any cognitive dissonance related to their names, but to love them wholeheartedly for themselves.
On me, Ta’if is mostly a blowsy peach and orange blossom chiffonade, interspersed with brief flashes here and there of something that might be interpreted as a tart, green rose. The peachy-powdery feel of the fragrance makes me think of something functional I used to use when I was a teenager, like the Impulse O2 body spray. The dry down is a slightly powdery musk with a streak of dates running through it, which doesn’t tilt too literally in the direction of any one particular note. Rather, one is bathed in a fluffy miasma of musk, fruit, orange blossoms, and caramel that reminds me of some of the prettier ‘pink-smelling’ dry downs in designer perfumery, such as Coco Mademoiselle, or Elie Saab.
Source of samples: Based on a sample set generously gifted to me in 2015 of the niche perfumer store in Dublin, ParfuMarija, I subsequently bought bottles or partials of most of the above. The Osmanthus Hair Mist was kindly gifted to me by Ormonde Jayne PR a couple of weeks ago, along with a Petits Fours box of samples of four of the La Route de la Soie collection sent to me for review (review is upcoming). My opinions are firmly my own.
Stupidly, I ignored this one for the longest time, believing it to be yet another Westernized take on oud. Guess what? It isn’t. The penny dropped just as I ran out of money, or at least the willingness to spend more than that €1.2 per ml limit Luca Turin originally advised us to stop at. This means that I don’t, and never will, own a bottle of Nawab of Oudh, which is terrible because this thing brings me to my knees.
But let’s make some lemonade out of dem lemons. I like to pretend that my bottle of Nawab of Oudh is hanging out at Roma Store, a small profumeria in Trastevere I frequent. Every month, I take a leisurely stroll down the Tiber to visit with the bottle of Nawab of Oudh the shop is kindly (but obliviously) hosting for me and douse myself liberally in its glorious juice. Then I walk back home, sniffing myself with a huge, dopey grin on my face, oblivious to how I look to passers-by.
Describing what Nawab of Oudh smells like is like trying to catch butterflies with a teaspoon. It has that gauzy, dizzying abstraction characteristic of so many Ormonde Jayne standouts like Black Gold and Rose Gold, and features – as far as I can tell – peppery spice, juicy mandarin, champagne-like aldehydes, roses, sandalwood, and a mass of creamy floral notes.
But I’m not sure any notes list adequately conveys the fierce joy of this scent. Better to say instead that this perfume gives you that Saturday morning feeling of good things to come – a crisply folded newspaper, a fresh pot of coffee, warm bread rolls, cold Irish butter, and a day of leisure stretching out in front of you like a cat. It smells like sunshine in a loved one’s hair and a just-cancelled meeting.
There is a point at the center of this fragrance that makes me think perfumer Geza Schoen might be playing around with an old Roucel-ian template of a green-ish magnolia bathed in a silky bath of citrus, honey, roses, and heavy cream (last seen in Roucel’s Guerlain’s L’Instant for Women and Rochas’ Tocade). The magnolia is viewed obliquely here, through a haze of spicy pepper, pimiento, cardamom, and cinnamon-dusted rose, but it’s definitely got some presence.
I love that when I spray it heavily, Nawab of Oudh coats the back of my hand with an aggressively oily sheen but then immediately radiates off into the air with an aldehydic swagger. Despite the name, there is little oud to speak of here, aside from a slightly sour, leathery tint to the soapy sandalwood in the base. I love this fragrance and believe it to be one of the most elegant and accomplished spicy oriental-florals that a woman or a man could wear.
Tsarina
Tsarina is a creamy, anisic floral suede that was the object of my affection obsession for much of 2016. It is a decidedly cool-toned fragrance; if it were an eyeshadow palette, Tsarina would be all dove greys and silvery taupes in the sort of satin finish that makes your eyelids appear expensively buffed. If it were a textile, it would be a length of raw silk, dotted with nubbins of texture that ride up pleasurably against the palm of your hand. Did I crack under the pressure of desire? Of course I did. It was 2016 and I was still spending money on perfume like they were bottles of H2O.
But even though I split a bottle with a friend during the famous Ormonde Jayne Black Friday event, Tsarina turned out to be an eye-wateringly expensive purchase. Not so much because of the price I paid, but because I never wore it as much as I thought I would. And a perfume sitting unloved in a collection is the costliest cost of all.
Three years on, I’m trying to understand my sudden and brutal withdrawal of affection for Tsarina. I suspect it covers too much of the same ground as Orris Noir (also by Ormonde Jayne), with its anise-tinted iris and myrrh, and maybe also L’Heure Bleue, with its medicinal heliotrope-iris tandem, for me to get any relief from this nagging cognitive dissonance. There’s also some overlap with the plasticky, clove-spiced benzoin creaminess of Guerlain Lui, which I also (somehow) own. But there’s also the fact that, for the 2020 me, Tsarina is now too rich, too claustrophobic.
But it is beautiful. Tsarina opens with the characteristic Ormonde Jayne blur of uplifting citrus and pepper notes, fueled by aldehydes, before quickly settling into that anisic, peppered ‘cream of wheat’ milkiness I associate with floral sandalwoods like Dries Van Noten (Frederic Malle) and the Pheromone attars produced by both Sharif LaRoche and Abdes Salaam Attar. Ormonde Jayne’s Vanille d’Iris, I find, recycles the same core of buttery iris suede, stripping it way back, and adding a dollop of plasticky vanilla to dull its ethereal gleam. As for Tsarina, once the first burst of spicy freshness dies away, both I and the fragrance miss it dearly.
Tsarina is soft and stodgy, like a bowl of porridge. Its lack of definition is probably why I sought it out so insistently the first time around, because I’m drawn to the boneless torpor of cream-sodden florals with little in the way of ballast propping them up. I find them comforting. However, for my money, stuff like Alamut by Lorenzo Villoresi – an exotic rice pudding-custard made out of tuberose, nag champa, and lots of civety sandalwood – satisfies the same itch and at less expense.
Of course, I didn’t know Alamut back then. Sure, if I could go back and tell my 2016 self that some of the perfumes I am passionate about would be rendered obsolete down the line by perfumes I was yet to smell, then I might have chosen differently. But I’m letting myself off the hook here. Tsarina is still a beautiful perfume judged against any parameter. It’s just that my 2020 self wants Nawab of Oudh more.
Qi
Qi is constructed to make no great statement thus offending no one. Lest you think I’m being bitchy, that sentence comes from the Ormonde Jayne official copy!
Normally, my shackles rise when I hear anyone describing a perfume as ‘inoffensive’ or, worse (shudder), ‘mass-pleasing’, because if that’s the end goal, then there’s no need to spend $425+ on a bottle of perfume when you can spend $5 on a bottle of that chocolatey, oudy Axe spray my husband is invariably wearing whenever I complement him on his lovely smell.
But honestly, Ormonde Jayne is onto something here. Osmanthus – for those not overly familiar with it – is a material that shares a rudely pungent quality with Hindi oud oil, black tea, and leather, all materials that have undergone some kind of process like soaking in water, tanning or smoking that lend them a distinctly fermented facet. I’m a fan of the fermented, but the uninitiated might find this particular floral note a challenge. The trick is to trim back the ruder, earthier facets of osmanthus absolute, and to capture only the fresh, pretty notes of the flower smelled straight from the plant.
And that’s exactly what Qi does. It is a super clean, bright take on osmanthus – a glowy little pop of apricot over soapy musks and fresh green tea (maté) that create enough of an illusion of leather to catch at the back of your throat. The osmanthus note is sustained for a remarkably long time, the fresh tea and soft leather notes soaked in an indelible peach or apricot ink. There’s also a whiff of clean rubber tubing – a pleasant inevitability whenever tea and osmanthus share the same space.
Despite the complex array of notes, though, Qi smells charmingly simple and ‘honest’. I can see this elegant glass of green tea, aromatized gently with a slice of apricot, appealing to many people. Ormonde Jayne is a rare house that knows what to do with osmanthus, and for me, Qi is its shining example. I prefer it to the also excellent Passionate Love, which is constructed along similar lines as Qi, but duskier, with a mineralic vetiver-and-Iso-E-Super drydown I’m less fond of.
Montabaco
An interesting fragrance. Revolving around a dank, green sage-tobacco accord that’s been lightened and spaced out by tons of Iso E Super, Montabaco is both dark-smelling and airy. Despite the distinctly aftershavey, fougère-like aspect to Montabaco that tags it as masculine, I have enjoyed smelling this on my skin and trying to break it down.
It’s worth mentioning that the two or three times I’ve worn this, my nine-year old son has sought me out to tell me that I smell really good. That makes me wonder if it’s just that Montabaco has huge sillage (thanks to the Iso E Super) or if there’s something in this fragrance that calls out to males.
I know that I’m not best placed to evaluate. When I smell a ‘classic male aftershave’ accord, something in the analysis part of my brain shuts down, blanking out the individual notes or components of the scent beyond the first and all-encompassing impression of ‘maleness’. But even to me, it’s clear that Montabaco is several pay grades above something like Brut or Azzaro Pour Homme.
And am I picking up on a sleight of hand here? With its flourishes of dry green herbs, ‘clovey’ spicing, and cleansing bay leaf, the central accord smells far more like cedarwood to me than tobacco leaf. This impression is underlined by a dollop of powdery amber that adds no sweetness but instead a pleasantly dustiness that softens the mealy bitterness of the cedarwood (or tobacco).
We are spared the intensely syrupy dried fruit and cacao notes that usually accompany tobacco. In fact, the vermouth-like dryness of the tobacco leaf in Montabaco reminds me very much of Miller Harris’ Feuilles de Tabac, pumped up with the creamy cedarwood baritone of Creed’s Royal Oud and fleshed out with a traditional barbershop fougère’s worth of spices and herbs. I liked Royal Oud and Feuilles de Tabac well enough, but Montabaco is more nuanced, more complex. If any of my male relatives were in the market for an interesting interpretation of a traditional tobacco or cedarwood-heavy fougère, and had the funds to go niche, I’d definitely point them in the direction of Montabaco.
Source of Samples: The staff at the Dublin niche perfume store ‘ParfuMarija’ generously included a sample set of the Ormonde Jayne house as a gift with purchase in 2016. The set included samples of the Four Corners of the World collection.